Brazil Blames Its Former Central Bank Chief for Fintech Chaos. Visitor Logs Suggest Otherwise
Regulation
Key Facts
—The charge. Finance minister Dario Durigan said on July 9 that the central bank under Roberto Campos Neto created an anarchy for fintechs.
—The mechanism. Many fintechs were licensed but never supervised, he said, and organised crime now uses them to launder money and collect illegal betting proceeds.
—The blame. He also said the Banco Master scandal arose under his predecessor’s administration.
—The log. Master representatives met central bank officials 65 times since 2019. Twenty-four fell in six years under Campos Neto, forty-one in eleven months under Gabriel Galípolo.
—The rates. That is roughly four meetings a year against more than forty in under a year, an order-of-magnitude difference in frequency.
—The caveat. No rule was broken. Central bank directors set their own diaries, and a bank in crisis is a bank a regulator sees often.
Brazil’s finance minister used a radio interview to pin the country’s Brazil fintech supervision failures on the previous central bank governor. The visitor log for the bank at the centre of the scandal tells a more complicated story.
On Thursday morning, Dario Durigan delivered a sharp accusation during a radio interview.
He said Roberto Campos Neto’s central bank licensed many fintechs but supervised none of them, creating what he called an anarchy under the pretext of being liberal. Criminal organisations now exploit those firms to launder money and collect proceeds from illegal betting, he added.
What Brazil fintech supervision actually looks like
The complaint has a real object. Brazil licensed a vast fintech sector at speed, and payment firms sit outside the supervisory perimeter that governs banks.
Durigan wants the timetable for bringing them under central bank supervision moved forward. He added that the government will not delay action because an election is approaching.
Nothing in that diagnosis is obviously wrong. The current governor has said much the same, warning that a resolution law written in 1975 cannot cope with digital banks and that his staff has shrunk by more than a thousand over a decade.
Then Durigan reached for the Banco Master scandal, and said it arose under his predecessor. That is where the argument runs into a number.
Sixty-five meetings, and where they fell
Central bank records show that representatives of Banco Master met officials of the institution sixty-five times between the bank’s founding in 2019 and its liquidation in November 2025.
Twenty-four of those meetings took place across the six years Campos Neto ran the bank. The remaining forty-one happened in the first eleven months of Gabriel Galípolo’s presidency.
Divide it out and the asymmetry is stark. Campos Neto’s central bank saw Master about four times a year; Galípolo’s saw it forty-one times in under one, a rate roughly ten times higher.
Galípolo was appointed by this government, and Durigan serves in it. During the interview he neither raised that record nor was asked about it.
The Brazil fintech supervision reading that cuts the other way
A high meeting count is not proof of anything improper, and it is important to say so. Master collapsed under Galípolo, and a regulator dealing with a failing bank sees that bank constantly.
Galípolo also ordered the liquidation, has closed thirteen banks since 2025, and told the Senate he found no evidence of wrongdoing by his predecessor. Campos Neto, by this newspaper’s earlier reporting, skipped a congressional summons three times.
One episode still sits awkwardly. In December 2024, while serving as monetary policy director and already designated as the next governor, Galípolo attended a meeting between President Lula and Master’s owner at the presidential palace.
No authority registered that meeting, and Galípolo did not tell Campos Neto about it. Central bank directors keep their own diaries and are under no obligation to report them, so no rule was broken.
Why a foreign investor should care
Brazil passed a law in 2021 to insulate its central bank from politics. The argument now under way is about who is responsible when supervision fails, and it is being conducted by a serving minister against a former governor in an election year.
That is precisely the terrain the autonomy law was meant to fence off. The substance of the fintech complaint may be sound, but the framing invites the reply that the record does not support it.
Anyone underwriting Brazilian financial risk should watch what follows the rhetoric. An accelerated supervisory timetable for payment firms would be the largest change to the regulatory perimeter in years, and it has now been promised out loud.
What did Durigan actually say?
Speaking to Rádio Gaúcha on July 9, the finance minister said the central bank under Roberto Campos Neto created an anarchy for fintechs under the pretext of being liberal, authorising many firms without supervising them. He said criminal organisations now use those fintechs to launder money and to receive proceeds from illegal betting, and that the supervisory timetable must be brought forward.
Does the meeting record contradict him?
It complicates the blame rather than refuting the diagnosis. Banco Master representatives met central bank officials twenty-four times during six years under Campos Neto and forty-one times during eleven months under Gabriel Galípolo, though the bank was collapsing in that later period and a regulator necessarily meets a failing institution often.
Was any rule broken?
No. Central bank directors are autonomous and need not disclose their appointments to the governor, so Galípolo breached no internal norm by attending an unregistered December 2024 meeting between President Lula and Daniel Vorcaro without informing Campos Neto.
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